Abstract
"Fallen on his feet in Buenos
Aires": Ulysses in Argentina
Patricia Novillo Corvalán (Birkbeck College,
University of London)
![](imagenes/tn_DSCN6599.jpg) |
In
this paper I examine Borges’s pioneering reception of
Joyce’s Ulysses
in relation to the literary, cultural and historical
contexts in which it took place. In a 1982 interview with
Seamus Heaney and Richard Kearney conducted during the
celebrations that took place in Dublin on 16th
June 1982 (Bloomsday), a blind and elderly Borges revealed
that in the early-twenties his friend and collaborator, the
Argentine writer Ricardo Güiraldes, presented him with a princeps
edition of Ulysses.
Güiraldes obtained his copy of Ulysses
through his personal and literary friendship with the French
critic, writer and translator, Valery Larbaud, who
coincidentally happened to be at the time the official
promoter of Joyce in Paris. I argue that if Larbaud has been
unanimously recognized as the European promoter of Ulysses,
then Borges fulfils a similar role in Latin America as the
Argentine publicist of Joyce’s experimental novel. The
arrival or ‘migration’ of the controversial Ulysses
to Argentina in 1924 fostered a timely cultural
transaction between France’s cultural elite, Joyce’s
Ireland, and Borges’s peripheral Buenos Aires. The
auspicious transatlantic journey of Güiraldes’s copy of Ulysses
from Paris to Buenos Aires also signals the nomadic
trajectory of the translated text which, according to Walter
Benjamin in his seminal essay ‘The Task of the
Translator’, the original [Joyce] is endowed with an
‘afterlife’ [Borges], a utopian survival in which it
depends upon the translation for its ever-recurring
existence.
The
second part of the paper discusses Borges’s publication of
a review and translation of ‘Penelope’
in the Buenos Aires avant-garde periodical Proa
[Prow]. The review Proa
was founded in 1924 by a young Borges, along with Güiraldes
and other fellow Argentine writers. In the January 1925
edition of Proa appeared
Borges’s review ‘Joyce’s Ulysses’
and fragmentary translation of ‘Penelope’ (he only
translated the last two pages of the book). Following his
avant-gardist impulses, Borges equates the innovative Ulysses
with the futuristic title of the journal and projects
the principles of the magazine into Joyce’s own writings.
By the same token, he infuses his translation of
‘Penelope’ with his current nationalistic agenda by
rendering Joyce’s passage into a distinctive type of
vernacular Spanish saturated with River Plate diction.
Borges’s translation strategy also seeks to create a
polyvalent image of Molly Bloom, a hybrid version that adds
to Joyce’s Hibernian and Gibraltarian heroine a clearly
defined Argentine identity. In a 1946 review of the first
complete translation of Ulysses
into Spanish by the Argentine José Salas Subirat,
Borges acknowledges the difficulties inherent in any
rendering of Joyce’s experimental language and recommends
a re-creative translation practice that encourages
inventiveness and emulates Joyce’s own experimental use of
language. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of
Borges’s translation of ‘Penelope’ in relation to the
subsequent translations of Ulysses
into Spanish by J. Salas Subirat (1945), J. M. Valverde
(1976) and F. García-Tortosa (1999).
|